


Life in Stages (of grief)

by Umbrella_ella



Series: Holding On and Letting Go [2]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Angst, Cancer, Depression, F/F, Grief, Healing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-30
Updated: 2015-12-30
Packaged: 2018-05-10 12:13:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5584993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Umbrella_ella/pseuds/Umbrella_ella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Love is like a disease, and it hurts and there are songs by Nazareth about it, except it isn't meant to feel like this. Maybe it's a cancer. That would explain why Regina feels like this."</p><p>Regina and Henry begin to move on. Well, moving on isn't exactly right. Moving is more apt. </p><p>Sequel to Thirteen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Life in Stages (of grief)

**Author's Note:**

> This is the unexpected, unplanned sequel to Thirteen. If you haven't read Thirteen, however, this story won't make much sense. 
> 
> To everyone who has read Thirteen, however, please grab all hankies, tissues, and other items you may wish to wipe your nose on.

_May 30 th_

Emma looks peaceful, and Regina is anything but. Her skin is crawling, itching, and she feels uneasy and hollow and all of the things that women who watch their lovers die feel, and Regina wants to tear the world apart at the seams.

There’s no one to take her home, and Regina wonders if Emma had anyone at all. Regina doesn’t even know where Emma called home before. The thought leaves her breathless in the quiet buzz of the room.

She supposes home for Emma had been the four walls of a white, naked room and the comfort of a thin hospital gown.

Emma’s hand is still in hers, and Regina tucks the blanket around Emma’s body, as if to warm her, suddenly aware of how chilly it is in the room. The ticking of the clock is monotonous and dull, pounding against Regina’s skull, and Regina stares at Emma, her eyes closed, and Regina is very aware of how Emma’s lips are tilted up in a final smile, mouth open just slightly, as if her life had ebbed away mid-breath, and Regina feels a hot anger rip at her chest, and her heartbeat keeps time with the clock—

_comebackcomebackcomebackcomebackcomebackIloveyou._

Regina stares at Emma’s chest, waiting for something— anything, really, her breath held in near anticipation, as if Emma had merely drowned in the depths of sleep and will come sputtering from her nightmares. She doesn’t.

Emma is cold by the time Regina leaves her bedside, her knees protesting as she rises. It’s as if every bit of her, every atom in her being is screaming at her to go back, but she closes the room door with a quiet snick.

She goes to Henry, who’s kicking the wall outside of the room angrily, Mary Margaret kneeling next to him, speaking quietly, his footfalls steady and firm against the baseboard. Regina kneels on the hard tile, her knees creaking as the nurse takes her leave, brushing her palm against her cheeks in a hopeless attempt to look professional before she heads back to the nurses station.

Regina takes Henry’s face in her hands. Tears have stained the collar of his very favorite plaid shirt, and he frowns at her. Regina looks at him, sees the cold, stony anger in his dark eyes, and brushes his hair away from his brow, knotted underneath her touch. She wants so much to tell him that she feels it too, this barbed wire tangle of hate and anger and pain and everything nasty snarled in between, but she kisses his cheek instead. Henry’s lips push out, a petulant scowl on his face, intensity ruined only by the tears gathering in his eyes. Regina feels her own eyes cloud, and she can’t see right.

Regina presses her face into Henry’s coat in a comforting gesture, but Henry steps back, out of the tender embrace of his mother, a look of utter betrayal marring his handsome, innocent face.

“Bring her back.”

His voice is small, childish, and suddenly he’s four, demanding and stubborn. He says it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world and Regina wants to run. She wants to run from this, from _dead_ Emma, from Henry, whose rage and hope and hurt all combine into something unspeakable, determined, and she wants to run.

But she stays.

Regina stays, and her hands meet the soft cotton of Henry’s hoodie, her fingers brushing his arms, up, down, up, down, doing her best to calm her own grief. Admittedly, it’s not working all that well, and her mouth tastes of metal and pain and _Emma_ , and Regina breaks.

Her sobs come in harsh gasps, muffled by the thick fabric of her son’s coat, and he’s clinging to her just as much as she is clinging to him, and then they’re both crying and it’s not fair, and none of this is fair, but they have to push on, keep going, and they have to bury her, bury Emma, in the cold dirt and they have to leave her there, and nothing hurts more than the thought of that.

* * *

_June 5 th _

They bury her on a rainy day.

The warm summer rain soaks Regina’s clothes, and the way the bandana sticks to her scalp in the downpour is uncomfortable, but she clutches at Henry’s hand, nails digging into her other palm when the dirt falls onto the coffin with a heavy sound, the dirt covering Emma.

Emma. Emma is dead, and Regina is burying her and nothing is right and Emma should be with her and Henry in the park, laughing and twirling in the rain and eating hot dogs and kissing Regina until they’re breathless and—

Henry buries his face into her jacket, his sudden movement sending a breathless exhale from her lungs, and Regina wants to hate Emma.

But she doesn’t.

She hates herself for it. Henry cries long after the minister leaves, and Mary Margaret stays for far longer than anyone else, but eventually, she leaves too, a sympathetic hand light on Regina’s shoulder. Henry stares at the headstone, epitaph reading _Lover, Mother, Fighter,_ as if that covers the extent of who Emma had been.

Emma was so much more, and Regina wants to scratch the words out until her fingers are raw, Regina wants to drop to her knees and scream, to beat the ground in a rage so blinding that even Henry would have to turn away. She wants all of it and none of it.

She wants Emma.

Instead, Emma is cold and alone beneath the dirt and Regina is cold and alone above the ground. Henry’s fingers are cold as he slips them into her hand, tugging her away.

She clambers out of the car with what little strength she has left, and Henry unlocks the door for her. The steady thump of his footfalls and the gentle shutting of his door is the only sound in the house. It’s too big, too empty, and of course, Regina feels like crying, like burying her emotions so deep they can’t touch her, but she can’t. Not really. Not now.

She busies herself with cleaning, until she’s weak from standing to long and she sinks onto the couch, slumping against the too comfortable cushions and heaving a sigh. Regina is alone, save for Henry, and she wonders how she’d done it before Emma. She closes her eyes then, and attempts sleep. Her eyes snap open with a grumble of disgust, and she sits up, her bones aching, and she wishes that today had been easy.

She sees it almost immediately. The framed photo of the three of them is staring up at her from the side table, mocking her. Emma’s smiling, her head canted towards Regina’s, as Henry laughs and Regina looks at Emma. Regina doesn’t think twice about it, but for the look in Emma’s eyes. Emma looks tired, bone deep, and if eyes were the windows to one’s soul, all she sees of Emma is an aching, raw pain, so deep that Regina wonders who Emma would be without it.

A bitter anger rises up, swelling in her throat, and the shattering of glass is all she can register, before she’s screaming and hurting and so very, very tender and raw, and it’s like every single wound she’d ever had, every scrape on her knee and every broken bone she’s ever had has been reimagined, brought to the forefront and magnified because nothing could ever be worse than this. She’s ripping apart from the inside and she can’t stop it, and she can feel her rage inside her, curling into her bones, digging deep, and she wonders if it’s her own cancer, her own disease that’s doing this, but she can’t stop the pain, and she thinks she might just prefer the cancer to whatever this is. Regina’s gaze is blurry from tears and her face is hot and she wants to rip apart everything, and she wants to rage against the world that took Emma away from her, _how dare they touch her, how dare the world take Emma away from her,_ she wants to stamp out every memory of Emma, every kiss they’d shared, from her mind.

Regina wants to hate everything about the last five months but she can’t and so she screams, raw rage and vitriol fueling her outburst. She’s aware she’s on her knees, hardwood digging painfully into her knees, but she doesn’t care, and she howls and shakes and curses every bit of Emma she can remember. She remembers the taste of Emma, like an early spring with the last cool snap of winter, like hotdogs from the street vendor in April, and terrible coffee from the hospital cafeteria and remembers the way Emma felt pressed against her, the bony feel of her body an aching reminder of the disease that was eating her from the inside out and Regina wants to hate it, hate _her_.

She wants to poison the memories with hate and anger and spite until she can’t stand to look back on them.

But she can’t.

Regina can’t hate the memories, can’t even hate herself for falling for Emma, because some bitter part of her is telling her _you knew this would happen, knew that it would always end this way,_ and she remembers how Emma laughed, remembers the feel of Emma’s lips against hers and Regina’s crying now, tears dripping off her chin and she drops her head to her hands.

Her throat burns and she’s so tired of it all.

Regina was, is, and always will be, in love with Emma Swan, and she’s lying if she says it doesn’t hurt.

She falls asleep that way, curled at the foot of the couch in the living room. Its dark when she wakes, heading pounding in time with her pulse, and she’s covered with a throw, a pillow stuffed beneath her bald head, where her scarf has slipped off into a haphazard wrinkled pile next to her.

The glass of the broken frame is long gone, and Regina spies the photograph laying on the table.

“Are you okay, mom?” Henry asks when she trudges into the kitchen where her son is picking at a barely touched peanut butter and banana sandwich.

“No,” Regina sighs, “No, I’m not.”

Henry looks up at her, and Regina looks back, and his eyes are red-rimmed and rubbed raw, his cheeks puffy from crying.

“Neither am I,” Henry admits quietly, and pushes the chair opposite him out with his foot, inviting her to sit with him.

It’s then that Regina realizes that she’s not alone, that Emma is gone, dead, and buried, but Henry, her son, is there too, and that maybe, just maybe, he’s hurting as much as she is.

Regina reaches out, takes his hand, and squeezes.

_It’s okay not to be okay._

* * *

_August 24 th_

Gone. Gone. Gone.

The cancer is gone. Well, in remission, but really, the likelihood of the illness returning is very little. Regina’s standing on the cemetery grass, always kept impeccably green, despite the ugly brown patches in her own yard that consistently remind her she has to install that automatic sprinkler system before her rosebushes die on her. The headstone is still pristine as ever, despite the heat of the Maine summer beating down on the stone.

Regina kneels to trace her fingers along the name, and she wishes it were skin, warm and soft meeting her fingertips, instead of the cool, hard stone. She pulls her fingers away, as though she’s been burned, and perhaps she has, because her fingers sting, and she cradles her hand to her chest as she falls further forward, the bare crown of her head resting on the gritty stone as she opens her eyes to look at the writing.

“I miss you,” Regina sighs, and she huddles closer to the ground, “I miss you and I’m sorry you had to go. I wish…”

Regina stops and finds that she wishes a great many things, none of which can ever come to past, chief among them that Emma had lived.But she had. In her own way, she had.

Emma lived, and Regina, well, it was a wonder she didn’t crumble at the slightest touch.

Regina wishes a great many things: that she and Emma had met earlier in life, or even better, in another lifetime, where neither of them had been dragged down into the depths of Hell by this ugly disease. She wishes that Emma hadn’t died at all, and on her worst days, when she can’t stand to look at Henry, Regina wishes she could follow Emma into that peaceful void.

But then Henry looks at her with all the hope in the world and Regina knows she could never let go.

The hot summer had done little to keep her grief at bay, and Henry had let her grieve, and it was only in the dead of night, when Henry’s small torso would press into hers, his hand slipping into her own, fingers clutching desperately, that her son grieved too.

The summer passed quickly enough, and so too did the treatments. There had been days when Regina lay in bed, praying to whatever god that heard her to let it end. There had been days where the sickness was too much, where Henry would stand over her in the bathroom, wiping her face with a cool rag while she retched. And then there were the good days, like today, where Regina would look at the photograph on her bedside table of the three of them without wanting to put it away, days like today where only a few minutes of her day were spent struggling for breath because she grieved too much and too deeply.

“I’m…” Regina stops, very aware of how loudly she’s speaking, but then, it’s a cemetery, why else does one visit the graves of their loved ones than to speak with them one last time?

“It’s gone. I’m— it’s in remission, it’s… the doctors told me this morning. Emma…”

Regina sobs her name, letting in fall against the cold stone as her lips brush against the stone. Relief and sadness churn and mix into something new, something nameless and Regina wonders if she could ever not be in love with Emma Swan. That’s a lie and she knows it. It's bone deep, this love, and even if she carved into her own body to dig it out, it won't ever wrench free.

 She means to tell Emma that she'll never leave, that she won't move on, that she'll love her for as long as it takes, but the words can't quite make it past her trembling lips, so instead, Regina presses her lips against the stone and hopes Emma understands.

“I love you, Emma. I love you. ”

Regina lets go of the headstone then, lifting herself from her knees, and goes back the way she came.

She thinks she might bring flowers tomorrow.


End file.
